Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #281: A History of Christian Worship Part Ten - The Present

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a I'm a recording artist, a singer, songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Well, hey, welcome back to Voices in My Head. This is Part 10. You thought it would never come, but we are finally up to Part 10 of the history of Christian worship. Last week, I believe it was, when I was drinking my tea— well, guess what? If you heard a sound of a rip, that's me opening a tea bag right now, and I'm about to bring to you Part 10. I should have had the foresight to start the Keurig with the hot tea in it a few minutes ago, but I didn't, so you may be hearing it in the background pouring what is going to be my delicious cup of tea. This has been an interesting day. I'm recording from a little bit different location today. I'm using my iPhone to record, which I often do, but I'm not down in my basement, in my basement in the middle of the night at a quiet lonely place. Today was the first day of school, first day of kindergarten for my son Alex, and so it's been one of those emotional mornings. I've been running errands, doing some different things, and went running after I took him to school today, and now I find myself around lunchtime at home by myself, which is something that almost never happened being a stay-at-home dad. And so I'm a little bit wondering what to do with myself. And I thought, well, you know what, I need to do this podcast today. And so here's— here I am. Instead of sitting and waiting and wondering how my son's first day went, I'm going to sit sip some tea and go through the History of Christian Worship Part 10 with you. You can probably hear my very noisy Keurig right now. I just finished, so I'm going to drop a tea bag in here and then we're going to go ahead and dive right in. I do want to share a very brief bit of news if you haven't been following me on social media. Uh, the album mixes are coming in at long last, and I'm so pleased with what I'm hearing. I imagine we'll be able to get the album released in the very near future. So I can't wait to share those songs with you. The mixes are really sounding wonderful. I also wanted to let you know that we're up to over 9,000 followers now as of this date. I think we gained a couple hundred more yesterday on our Mr. Rogers Say Twitter account. And I asked all the followers on Twitter what they thought of the idea of doing a podcast a separate podcast from Voices in My Head about Mr. Rogers and being a good neighbor in the world, something that is based in his kindness. And I do have some news. It looks like there's enough interest in it. We had several hundred responses, and it looks like people want to hear that kind of a podcast. So it looks like I'll be having a co-host, which I will be announcing soon, hopefully. And I've been talking with someone who I really admire who is in broadcasting and does a does a wonderful job, who has not only a great podcast, but even some of his shows are aired on NPR. And so we are looking into what it would mean to do this kind of podcast. So be looking for a second podcast very soon based out of the Mr. Rogers Say quotes account that I have in that community that is just growing weekly. I, I think we're averaging between 500 to 1,000 new people every week, and I try to follow back as much as I can. Because it really is a wonderful community of people. Well, that's it. No more further advertisements right now. You can go to RickLeeJames.com to find out all you need on those fronts, I believe. But this week I'm gonna get into Session 10 of A History of Christian Worship: The Present. And this is sort of my assessment of things, and I hope you won't be too disappointed. I'm sure that there are conclusions that I have not come to that are so much more brilliant, that are so much better than what I have come to on this. But these are a few of my reflec— reflections after this time doing these sessions together, and where we are maybe in the present, maybe some places where we can go. I'll probably have some other thoughts after this. But it's been a long journey, and it was a tiring journey doing this. A good journey, I think even a holy journey, but a tiring one. And so I wonder if at this point I'm even making sense anymore because there's so much to it. But here we go. I hope that it will be something that you enjoy, and I hope it's something you can continue to use as a resource for years to come. Part 10: A History of Christian Worship: The Present. In Session 1 of this study, we established that we would strive to be very specific about what corporate Christian worship is and what it means. By Christian worship, we mean worship that is focused on God the Father. Revealed to us in Jesus Christ the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. Corporate worship is worship that is shared by members of a group. So, while Christian worship is intensely personal, it is by no means private. When we participate in corporate Christian worship, we are doing so together with the entire body of Christ, taking part in a corporate activity with all Christians everywhere, not just the people in the room where we are actively worshiping, but with the church universal. The frustrating part about studying church history, for me anyway, is seeing how time and time again many people have sought to make their worship of God conform to their own image rather than allowing themselves to be conformed into the image of the God who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We see this today in our tendency to define worship simply as the musical part of the service. That is a real frustration for me. For some, when they hear the word worship, they simply think of it as a genre, a type of music that you find on iTunes or on Spotify. Because of this, there have been many more worship wars in the 20th century waged over style than over substance. For many in our congregations, worship is a matter of musical style, and if the music leader doesn't pick the style that they like, then they will simply abstain from singing and maybe even leave the church to find a congregation whose musical tastes better fit their own. This is a tragic misunderstanding of worship, but for many, for better or worse, It's where the Reformation has led us to. If we hope to be a church that is renewed through its worship, pastors and music leaders must find a way to reintroduce their congregations to rooted, authentic Christian worship. The last half of the 20th century was dominated by the influence of the church growth movement, and once again our understanding of what worship is changed. On the positive side, the church growth movement gave North American Christians a renewed passion to seek and to save the lost. But of this, because of this, our houses of worship changed not only in service style, but even in their architecture. With great fervor, congregations did all they could to make their services and their houses of worship accessible to people who are not yet believers. Something the church had never really done. In undertaking this, yes, I'll call it a noble task of seeking the lost, we not only changed what was presented in worship, we changed how we worshiped. By and large, church folks forsook church history and liturgy, and in its place adopted mass marketing techniques designed to reach certain audiences. Or shall I call them consumers, to use the language of the church growth movement. Certain audiences by their spiritual status, we call them seekers or believers. Their age, are they Boomers, are they Busters, are they Gen Xers, are they Millennials? Their cultural background, or some combination of all these things. The church growth movement in seeking its, and I'm gonna do air quotes here, not that you can see them, but seeking its target audiences, and striving to meet its, air quotes again, "felt needs" of a people, unfortunately began shaping our worship practices more than biblical, historical, or theological considerations. For all of our striving to become mega churches, to meet the needs of our target audiences, we neglected the essentials of worship. Now metaphorically, we became an inch deep and a mile wide, a phrase that I'm sure you have heard many times. Or some of us just went an inch deep and didn't get wide at all. The good news is that these days, in the wake of the church growth movement, and the good as well as the damage it has done, there seems to be a growing understanding that communal worship is central to the life of faith. If our faith is not proclaimed and enacted in Sunday morning worship, or in worship period, then it will not likely happen elsewhere. If we do not receive our identity and our marching orders in our time of thanksgiving and praise together, then we likely won't receive it at all. This makes what we do in our time of worship, be it on Sunday morning or some other time that you meet as a group, as a congregation to worship, it makes this time incredibly important to the discipleship of our people. I'm going to refer to it as the hour of worship on Sunday morning because that's usually about what it is for most people in most places, give or take. From the gathering to the scattering, we must make every moment, every prayer, every lyric, every reading, every sermon, and every invitation count. There's not much time. As leaders of worship services, if that's you, by the way, pay attention. As leaders of worship services, it will help us if we see Christian worship not so much as a set of words and rote texts, but rather a pattern of basic actions which allows us to frame the story we are telling. Instead of seeing worship as the work of a few performers on stage, we can fix our gaze to see worship as a gathered people in communion and conversation with our God. Worship can't simply be a matter of leading some songs so that we can get to the sermon and then go home. Worship is an escape into the real world of the Kingdom of God where everything we do has meaning. I've heard it said that when we gather for worship, the "I" becomes "we," and our personal experience gives way to a communal fellowship of the body of Christ. Christ. When we can see worship less as a performance and more as a dialogue between the risen Christ and his church, then our worship will begin to make more sense. A study of the history of worship allows us to— excuse me— allows us to intelligently turn a critical eye to our services of worship to distinguish between what is essential, what is important, and what has no place in worship at all. Do we really need a special song every week? Honestly, they usually aren't that special. We are living in a period of much liturgical experimentation. A rootedness in church history can help us prayerfully discern between holy innovations and manipulative fads. The Sunday morning gathering for worship is not primarily a time for private worship. It is a corporate experience to draw us more fully into the body of Christ. If we truly wish to achieve corporate Christian worship, then our singing must be corporate, our praying must be corporate, our actions in worship must be corporate. Corporate Christian worship will not happen by accident or by doing worship the way we always have, just because we always have. If the history of worship teaches us anything, it's that we should also be very concerned about the lack of lay involvement in our congregations. Evangelicals are the first to talk about the priesthood of all believers, but we have created worship services where the clergy do all the preaching, all the praying, all the speaking, and all the leading, while our people passively sit and listen for the most part. It takes a lot of work, but if we want to create a community who actively worships God together, then we must allow them to be active worshipers. Our study of the history of Christian worship should also teach us that poorly constructed services are a detriment to our corporate worship. We've only got this hour on Sunday morning for the most part. Our people don't seem to be coming back much of any other time in many places. That's a lot of weight to put on a Sunday morning worship service, that that should be where discipleship happens, but it's what we have, and unfortunately it's what we have to work with. Too many of our Sunday services have little sense of connectedness and logical flow. Too often the sermon has little or nothing to do with the rest of the service, the church year, or even Scripture itself. Too many of our prayer times consist of allowing a pastor to preach a sermon with his or her eyes closed while the congregation listens, or more likely zones out for 3 to 5 minutes. For people who claim to be a people of the Word, there is an appalling lack of Scripture in our services. And too often when Scriptures are read, they are handled haphazardly with a sense of apathy. We are also guilty of choosing music based on top 10 CCLI charts rather than on the themes of the day. It's a hard truth, but if we give our people insufficient opportunity to respond, then it follows that we will have a congregation that responds insufficiently. On a final note, I hope that these weeks, this survey of worship through the ages has shown us that we have elevated the sermon to a place it was never intended to be, just like we have elevated music to a place it was never intended to be. We have tried to make a supreme sacrament out of the sermon, but worship history teaches us that the basic, full, and normative pattern for Sunday worship for Christians in all places and in all times has been the service of the word and table. The Sacrament of Communion has been with us from the beginning, and to neglect it is to cheat our people out of their chance to respond to the word, keeping them from the full range of Christian experience. I don't say that lightly. Christian worship is designed to take us to the table where Christ is the host. From the very beginning, that was the purpose. To neglect it is like inviting company over for dinner only to send them home after the water is served. Week after week, many of our pastors shake their heads wondering why in the world they can't get people to respond to their sermons, but the fact is that they have robbed them of the opportunity by only celebrating the Eucharist sporadically. Our congregations are not responding to our pastor's sermons. They are responding to Christ. And if we give them a chance only to respond to a sermon, then maybe we are robbing them of the chance to respond to Christ. Our congregations are literally starving, and too many churches are withholding what John Wesley calls the sustaining meal of the believer. The history of Christian worship shows us that the Lord's Table is the primary biblical and historical response to the read, prayed, and preached Word. That is a fact. Church history reveals to us that the recovery of the Lord's Supper as a frequently celebrated Sunday event is part of our path to worship renewal. History also teaches us that when we celebrate the Lord's table, our focus should be on the entire saving work of Christ—his birth, healing, suffering, teaching, death, resurrection, ascension, and lordship, not just a meal in the upper room. Communion is to be a corporate act, not a private snack. The root word of communion is commune, after all. We Protestants are learning that the Lord's Supper is to be tasted, touched, smelled, and enacted. So try not to be stingy with the bread and the cup. There's nothing wrong with using a loaf of homemade baked bread. Make it the good stuff because we worship a God who is so rich. As we now end this study, and I know there's more that could be said, lots more, and I'm not trying to make it comprehensive. I am just trying to wrap it up and bring it to a conclusion that maybe we can think. Let's allow the questions of our past to guide us into our future. How do we best make Christians? should be the question that we are asking. How do we best proclaim the word? How do we best tell the story? How do we best make disciples? Let the prayers we pray and the praise we bring in our context in the present join with the great cloud of witnesses that surround us in all times and places to reach out in worship to the God who is reaching out to us. He has told us in His Word that the way He wants us to remember Him is together at the table. He said of the table, "Do this in remembrance of me." To do this. He didn't say do preaching. He didn't say do music. He didn't say take offerings. He didn't say take specials. He said of the table, do this in remembrance of me, because above all I want to be remembered as the host of this great wedding banquet that we will all celebrate together for all eternity. Well, that's about it, my friends. There's a lot more we could discuss, as I said, but I'm not gonna go there today. I know this may have seemed like an abrupt end to our study. And I haven't covered many things. We know that even since Pope Francis there seems to be many new reformations taking place in the Catholic Church. There seems to be a resurgence in interest especially in Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity. And I'm grateful for these things. But there's a lot to think about and a lot of questions that are unanswered and it's our job to answer those questions. It's okay to disagree with things I've said. It's okay to disagree with conclusions I've come to, but I hope we have good reasons for doing so. I've tried to present things as factually as I knew how to do and have tried to let the Spirit lead in this study as much as possible. I owe a great debt, a great debt to people like William Willimon, who I relied on heavily— resources from William Willimon for this study. Study, who has done great work in the history of Christian worship. People like Robert Webber, different prayer books, different things like the Book of Common Prayer. It's been an interesting time for me, and I hope it's been beneficial for you. But I hope we can close with those thoughts in mind. How do we best make Christians? How do we best proclaim the word? How do we best tell the story, and how do we best make disciples? I want to be faithful. And maybe the better question is not how do we best do it even, maybe it's how do we faithfully do it? Because maybe that is the best way. How do we faithfully make Christians? How do we faithfully proclaim the word? How do we faithfully tell the story? How do we faithfully make disciples? Maybe it's not following every wind that blows along, maybe it's allowing ourselves to be carried along by the spirit that has been carrying us for over 2,000 years now. Well, thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. We've got some great episodes already recorded that'll be coming to you in the coming weeks. We have John Tibbs joining us, we have David Dalt. Tomorrow I will be recording a podcast with Michael G. Long, the author of the book about Mr. Rogers' activism called Peaceful Neighbor. It's a wonderful book, goes a lot of places that the new documentary doesn't even cover. It's much more exhaustive in his faith and in the reason that he did things. So I'm looking forward to that conversation tomorrow. So we've got some good shows ahead. There will be much more, doing our best to make it to episode 300 by the end of this year. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. I appreciate you, and I encourage you, give me some feedback. I'd love to hear what you thought about this study and how you're enjoying the podcast. God bless you. See you next time.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/groups/voicesinmyhead.

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And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website at rickleejames.com/bookings. And it would mean the world to me if you would write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now, the benediction. May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.